In an ideal world, you could take advantage of every aspect of every social media network: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, foursquare, and others. But what if your company can invest time and money in just one of these platforms? Brian Carter, author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money with Facebook, points out the pluses and minuses of the two most popular choices, Facebook and Twitter.

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The social media industry has been working out how to track business results from Twitter for a year or two longer than with Facebook. But Facebook reaches at least 40 times as many people as Twitter does, and there are a number of other important areas of comparison, as detailed in Figure 1.

How Many People Does Each Social Site Reach?

The biggest difference between Facebook and Twitter, which impacts many of the other criteria, is that about eight times as many people use Facebook. As of this writing, Facebook has around 800 million active users (active being defined as those who use the site at least once a month). Twitter has more than 200 million accounts, but only about 100 million users log in at least once per month, and of those, only 60% tweet once per month, according to the Huffington Post.